Why is a nuclear engineer and a DARPA visionary teaming up with a hydrodynamic modeler to build … reefs? Because six beachfront resorts and $10 million of pilots in the pipeline are telling them that this is just a tiny fraction of the total $100 billion coastal defense market that nobody seems to have a solution for.

We didn’t fund this because reefs are cute–reefs are also one of the most resilient structures to reduce the wave energy coming on shore. In a world where 100-year storms are coming every few years, this is more urgent than ever. The customers aren’t just resorts and coastal residential communities, they’re governments, too. For example, Miami-Dade county alone spent over $340 million in the past decade on reversing the wave damage done to their beaches.

Our investment in ReefStarter was largely on their scalable, Lego-like solution, designed at the meters-scale, and detailed down to the millimeter-scale. They’ve already shown that they can reduce the wave energy, grow coral, and attract wildlife – incidentally, also very lucrative for the beachfront owners. The next round is to deliver their pilots and attract other customers who want to protect their beaches, too.